Monday, 10 June 2013

HEROES NEVER DIE: PARKER AND HAMMER

Note: this essay originally appeared as my twelfth American Eye column
at Shots, in January 2009. I originally posted on this site a link to the piece, but the link no longer functions, hence my reprinting it now. But it prompted a spirited exchange with Max Allan Collins, which you can find with the original post here.

HEROES NEVER DIE

It's always sad to mark
the passing of an era, and even sadder when you're reminded of
another you'd marked already. This essay is dedicated to
two giants of the field, which makes it appropriate that one of the
books discussed is The Goliath Bone, the first of a number of Mike
Hammer manuscripts Mickey Spillane left behind and which Max Allan
Collins has completed. And at the end of January, less than a month
after Donald Westlake's sudden death on New Year's Eve, Richard
Stark's latest, and I suppose last, Parker novel, Dirty Money
appears. It occurs to me you could argue that all the Parker books
were begun by Westlake, and finished by Stark from Westlake's notes.

At one point in Dirty
Money, the police release an artist's sketch which deliberately makes
Parker kinder and softer, exactly what I mentioned when Westlake
revived Stark and Parker in 1998 (was it really that long ago?). Kinder and gentler? Parker and Claire actually stay in a Berkshires
B&B surrounded by leaf peepers, and Parker manages to blend in,
as far as that goes. The subject of Parker
aging never comes up, although his attitude toward Claire is somewhat
less prehistoric than it was in the first series of books. He doesn't
seem to have aged because Parker was never really a child of his
time, or any time, but there is one problem: modern technology,
surveillance, communications, forensics, have certainly made the life
of the professional criminal more difficult.

The story picks up
where Ask The Parrot left off, but the botched heist happened two
books ago, in Nobody Runs Forever. I am convinced Westlake intended
this story to be on-going, from book to book, for just as long as he
could manage. Raymond Chandler once wrote that whenever your plotting
gets stuck, have someone with a gun come in the room, Westlake has
refined that dictum; the characters may or may not have guns, but
they almost always have or can discover larcenous motives—double
cross has always been the central theme of the Parker books. Parker
is looking to collect cash he left behind in a church, and all sorts
of people, from a tough-talking lesbian bounty-hunter to a hapless
wanna-be true crime writer, are getting involved, and most of them
are looking to take some of the dough, or all of it. They are
introduced and described with such care, as are others, like the real
Tony Soprano, New Jersey crime boss Frank Meany, or the Massachusetts
state trooper Gwen Reversia, that you're certain they were destined
to appear again. My feeling is that Parker's anonymity would continue
to be compromised, book by book, until Westlake reached the point he
couldn't write Parker out of. Things always came back to haunt
Parker; if his life were easy, it would never have been fun to write
about. Or to read. So I'm sad that my dream of Parker's Last Stand
will never come about.

According to Mickey
Spillane, there could never be a last stand for Mike Hammer, because 'see, heroes never die.
John Wayne isn't dead. Elvis isn't dead...you can't kill a hero'. He
said it to me when I interviewed him, he said it on stage the next
night at the NFT, and I'm sure he said it a million more times. And
it's true, but only to a point. The Duke didn't die, of course, but he went out
perfectly before that death, in The Shootist. Even earlier he'd had the luxury of
working his way through a host of different valedictory performances,
among them The Cowboys (very good) True Grit (good) and McQ (not so
good) before he and Don Siegel made their small classic.

Mike Hammer had no such
luck; he's been out of print for a long time, consigned to being
a relic of his era; Hammer is firmly entrench-coated into immediate
postwar America, he's one of the best representations of the era's
unconscious drives, and even though he moved reasonably well into the
sixties, the ferocious drive and energy wasn't there; the times had
changed (and so, in fairness, had Mickey). Mickey left
six Hammer manuscripts in different stages of completion, and The
Goliath Bone was the most fully finished, but it's also the most
risky with which to launch a Hammer revival, because it's set in post
9/11 New York, thus taking Mike Hammer as far as possible out of own
times and into a time warp.

Face it: Hammer has to
be in his eighties by the time the jets crash into the World Trade
towers. For the story's purposes, he's played as if in his late
fifties or early sixties, I'd guess, and he's actually planning on
making Velda an honest woman at long last, but it never jells. That's
because it's not your disbelief you're being asked to suspend, but
your belief, in the character Mickey created, and in the writing he
did when he was young and hungry. The writing here, whether it's
Mickeys or Max's, just doesn't have the same intensity; it's too
knowing. The thing that made Kiss Me Deadly work so well as a film
was that Robert Aldrich and Buzz Bezzerides recognised the primal
drives that Hammer represented; they felt the energy in the prose,
the manic power of the character. That's gone now; this Mike Hammer
is far closer to Mickey doing his Miller Lite ads, or telling his
fantastic stories; Stacy Keach could play this story in the TV series
without too much problem; hell, Mickey might even be able to play it
himself, in his 80s. But as Hammer fiction it just doesn't take off.

Not that they don't
try. As Velda says, at one point, Mike is taking on, literally, the
whole damn world, and the David and Goliath metaphor isn't lost on
anyone. This is just before they actually do get married, and Mike
turns down a hell of a seduction attempt on the eve of his wedding;
this is a kinder gentler Mike Hammer too. Well kinder, maybe. And there
are plenty of jokes about relics.

But even as the plot
gets going, it winds up depending on his trusty .45 being not so
trusty after all. The biggest twist is, if you know the Hammer
novels, pretty obvious, and though it's fun, it just isn't the same
thing. At one point, Pat Chambers, Hammer's long-time buddy, police
foil, and longer-after Velda, says 'nothing lasts forever, Mike'.
Velda tells him 'a relic is in the past, Mike'. That contradicts
Mickey, who said that heroes never die, but they're both right.
Heroes live forever, but they live in the worlds in which they are
heroes, and they aren't always such heroes in other worlds.
Apparently, some of the other unfinished Hammer novels are period
pieces, and some take Hammer through the decades. I'll look forward
to seeing what Mickey and Max do with Hammer in the world where he
belongs.

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